One Hesitates the Use the Prefix Post

Old news: representation and academic novelty

Noel Castree, School of Geography, Manchester University, Manchester, England, M13 9PL Email: [email protected] Thomas MacMillan, Food Ethics Council, Brighton, England Email: [email protected]

Abstract: The new outstrips the old – but only sometimes. This short essay identifies four forms of ‘novelty’ in Anglophone human geography. Taking the case of a nascent ‘non-representational geography’ some concerns are raised about the seeming ennui with representation as a research issue and as a practical and political resource. Far from insisting that ‘old’ intellectual fashions are better than new ones, we simply caution against travelling forward minus some important baggage. By way of seven theses, we finesse critical geography’s engagement with representation and argue that any non-representational ‘alternative’ should not be seen as jettisoning the substantial power of representational acts.

Keywords: academic innovation; representation; non-representational theory; politics

What’s next?

Anglophone human geography has been unusually dynamic this last decade or so.

Intellectual change, it seems, is now the only disciplinary constant. Some have experienced the procession of new isms, ologies and ‘turns’ in human geography as a threat to subject identity. Others are no doubt exhausted by the ceaseless profusion of theories, methodologies and data sources. Still others, by contrast, have welcomed the multiplication of approaches that now clamour for our collective attention. However it’s received, it seems to us that change in contemporary human geography is typically figured as ‘novelty’. This novelty, to simplify, takes three overlapping forms. First, it features as addition: that is, the introduction of something that just wasn’t there before.

Gay and lesbian, disabled, and childrens’ geographies are just a few examples of new topics that have been added to the discipline. Second, some addition takes the form of transformation. That is, several emerging adjectival geographies cannot be ‘safely’ pigeonholed but instead challenge conventional ways of knowing and doing across the discipline as a whole. Various strands of feminist geography are obvious examples here.

Finally, novelty in contemporary human geography frequently takes the form of supercession. This entails an attempted ‘overcoming’ of inherited cognitive and

1 normative habits by claiming the position of a ‘constitutive outside’. The plethora of post-prefixed geographies – post-modernism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism, to name but three prominent ones – arguably fall into this third category of newness. They define themselves as ‘beyond’ the specified postfix, yet do so with direct, agonistic reference to it. This is a complex beyondness, at once relational and ambivalent rather than absolute.

We mention all this not as a prelude to some grand survey of where Anglophone human geography as a whole might be going. More modestly, we want to draw attention to a fourth form of novelty that is routinely displaced by the three we’ve identified: namely, novelty as the return of the old (or the continuation of the recently passé). This may seem a contradiction in terms, so let’s be clear about what we mean here. This fourth form of newness is not the Phoenix-like rebirth of tried, tested and ultimately unreconstructed approaches in human geography that have weathered the storm of disciplinary critique and change. Rather, it is the finessing of important insights, themes, concepts, techniques or what-have-you in the belief that they still offer us something of value in the present (cf. Doel, this issue). Novelty in human geography needn’t always be about ‘strong’ innovation – that is, addition, transformation or supercession. It can also involve the reclamation and reworking of the familiar – and this needn’t be a covert resurrection of precisely what has gone before (though there may grounds for recuperating the old in certain situations).

The ‘old news’ that concerns us in this essay is representation. We argue for the continued need to study something called representation – or rather, the cluster of practices this term denotes. Representation – its inclusions and excisions, its performativity and power – has been a dominant theme in critical human geography over the last decade. Though, in both the formal political sense (e.g. voting systems) and the statistical sense (e.g. the sample-population relationship), it has long been a concern of

2 human geographers, in recent years critical geographers have been more interested in representation as a textual, oral and visual act woven into any and all social practices. In this broader sense, representation has been a particular preoccupation of those geographers advocating supercessive novelties like post-structuralism and post- colonialism during the 1990s. All manner of images, maps, travel books, magazines, films, adverts, texts, discourses and metaphors have been subject to ‘deconstructive’,

‘symptomatic’ and ‘denaturalizing’ readings. Reversing the causal arrows, critics have been keen to show that representations do not depict a mutely non-representational

‘reality’ but, rather, create the effect of such a reality as the guarantor of their putative veracity. These critics have taken a sceptical, ironic or reflexive stance on both representations and representers – and an auto-critical stance at that. But no sooner has representation become a core research thematic on the geographical left than it is being pushed to one side. The allure of its novely has seemingly worn-off already: for several critical geographers are now on the hunt for what might variously call a ‘post-’, ‘after-’ or ‘non-representational’ geography. As Christopher Prendergast (2000: ix) puts it, representation is now “a concept in ruins, carpet bombed by the formidable arsenals of contemporary critical theory”.

The turnover time of ideas in contemporary Anglophone human geography is fast indeed. The cynic might argue that human geographers’ compulsion for ceaseless intellectual innovation is symptomatic of academic capitalism, where the currency is books and papers not money (excepting research grants of course). But this view would be too cynical. The critics now seeking to take the geographical left ‘beyond representation’ are making a serious point. The 1990s cottage industry devoted to analysing the origins, mechanics and consequences of representation, they argue, has blinded critical human geographers to some important things. What’s more, we’ll see that this argument does not implicate those making it in self-serving stereotypes of

3 representation that justify their non-/after-/post-representational ‘alternative’. So our call for an affirmation of “the irreducibility of representation” (Barnett, 1999: 286) will not be an oppositional one. We do not want to dismiss the claims of those wishing to take us beyond representation. In fact, we believe these claims are, in the main, very well founded. Our aim is simply to raise some questions about these claims, while arguing for a ‘new’ focus on representation (that is to say, for a continuing concern with it as a research issue and as practice) that’s intensely alert to its ineluctable possibilities and perils. To quote Prendergast (op. cit. x) once more, we are recommending the “renewal of a different, and more judicious, kind of reflexive turning back …, something more sensitive to complexity and ambiguity than the catchphrases … ‘against’ representation or, in even more naïve register, ‘beyond’ representation”. It is a turning back that we feel confident many advocates of a non-/post-/after-representational geography might happily embrace.

A post-/after-/non-representational geography

Fatigue has set in and it was probably inevitable. As a subject of theoretical and empirical concern representation seems to have had its day. Learned disquisitions on Derrida,

Barthes, Baudrillard, Bhabha, Foucault, Said, Saussure, Spivak and other analysts of representation are now ten-a-penny, not just in critical geography but across the humanities and social sciences. Likewise, any number of empirically grounded studies now exist that either read a text/image/discourse ‘against the grain’ or foreground the counter-hegemonic representations of the subaltern, the other, and the outsider. Critical human geography’s representational cup runneth over. Of course, this raises the question of what is meant by the term ‘representation’. It is by no means easy to answer: after all, representation does not, as it were, represent itself. It seems to us that, in geographical discourse at least, representation has come to mean a set of practices wherein a putative

4 representative (an individual, group or institution) claims to depict or stand for something separate from and not reducible to either that representative or their depiction (the representation). In theoretical terms these practices can be seen as ideological (as in several Marxian analyses), as hegemonic (as in several post-Marxist accounts) or as expansive discursive grids (as certain Derridean and Foucauldian analyses). Depending on which theoretical account is favoured, the ‘success’ of these practices is seen to depend upon either the social legitimacy of the representatives, the mystificatory powers of the representation/s or the ability of representations to both call forth the effect of a domain of represented entities and to influence them by seeming merely to depict them.

Of course, to talk about representation in general, as we are doing, is not only to hypostatise it (that is, to abstract it from the other practices within which it is embedded).

It is also to suppose that one can subjugate the varieties of representational practices

(oral, written and depicted) to some fundamental characteristics. Our defense is that to talk of any practice one must necessarily pluck it from its wider context. What is more, our desire here to talk about representation in the singular is hardly unique or unusual. As we shall see below, those critics who wish to question an enduring concern with representation as a research issue must themselves represent ‘it’ as a thing that transcends any specific instance.

There has, of course, been a fair amount of morphing in how representation has been studied by human geographers. After the critiques of ideology in the 1980s, the subsequent ‘cultural turn’ called the representation-reality dualism into question. Once some early clashes on the realism-relativism question (e.g. Strohmayer and Hannah,

1992; Sayer, 1993) subsided, the geographical debates over representation matured. They also became largely informed by the theoretical resources of the ‘posts’ (post- structuralism, post-modernism and post-colonialism), themselves far from homogeneous.

Even those who remain bemused by post-prefixed critical geography’s representational

5 turn now accept that it is not synonymous with a facile ‘discourse is everything’ or ‘there is nothing beyond the text’ position. As Barnett (1999) explains in a didactic essay on

Derridean deconstruction, to anatomise representation is not to fetishise it. There’s more to the world than representation, he argues, but representation is nonetheless a powerful world-disclosing and world-changing technology. That is, it’s practical and performative; it’s a tool and it assuredly has effects.

However, equipped even with this more rigorous understanding of representation, a certain ennui seems to have set in during the late 1990s. There was, perhaps, a feeling that the point of diminishing theoretico-political returns had been reached. What would one more decoding of a sign, symbol or metaphor achieve? What ‘value added’ was to be got from permitting ever more narrowly defined ‘others’ the right to be represented?

More positively, one can conjecture that some critical geographers simply wanted to explore what a research focus on something called representation missed. This is not as straightforward as it appears. The ‘unknown continent’ waiting to be ‘discovered’ once the obsession with representation subsides is not some pristine ‘extra-discursive’ world of fully-formed matter, social and/or natural. More subtlely, it’s all those animate and inanimate things that remain hidden from view or misconstrued even when we think that reflexively and sensitively crafted representations might disclose them. To approach these things with a post-/after-/non-representational sensibility is not to suppose that they can speak for themselves. Rather, it’s to refuse the trial by representation. It’s to insist that there might be other ways of knowing, and therefore doing, than those permitted by what are normally understood as representational acts (however finely tuned those understandings may be).

Rather than seek to review the full range of work in this area, we can flesh out this incipient post-/after-/non-representational geography with reference to two authors whose work we know well. Nigel Thrift (1996; 2002) and Steve Hinchliffe (2001; 2003)

6 are, like many geographers, intensely interested in the relationships between what we conventionally call ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’, ‘social’ entities and ‘natural’ entities. In his Spatial formations, Thrift (1996) coined the term ‘non-representational theory’ to describe his project, while Hinchliffe (2002) has been more circumspect, advocating practices of ‘inhabitation’ as supplements to, and enrichments of, those of representation. What do they mean by these expressions? And what is at stake? In a recent essay entitled ‘Summoning life’ Thrift (2002) provides a manifesto-like answer to these questions. His starting point is to question a common belief captured by Olkowski

(1999: 211): “For many contemporary thinkers … representation is inevitable and the composition of a kind of thinking and series of practices that constitute the ruin of representation is nonsense”. Thrift’s critique of representation seems blunt at first sight, but turns out to be very sophisticated. Inspired by new vitalism (a la Deleuze), notions of embodiment (a la Merleau-Ponty), science studies (a la Latour), post-Freudian psychoanalysis (a la Billig), and performance theory (a la Melrose), he levels three principal charges at representation. First, representation is about distance – a scholastic disposition that divorces putative ‘observers’ from ‘objects’. Second, representation is about codification – it seeks to ‘fix’ or ‘capture’ the represented as if it/they possess/es some stable identity. Finally, for Thrift representation is about cognition, speech and vision as if these were the only or privileged way of knowing things and, thus, of doing things.

Though seemingly conventional, this critique of representation is doubly subversive. First, Thrift directs his animus not just at representation as an object of academic inquiry but also at academics themselves. He thus uses the term ‘theory’ to describe his non-representational ambitions in an ironic sense. His is not the muscular theory of the typical university expert, but a modest intervention in which the privileges of academic knowing are surrendered. In other words, Thrift challenges the idea that the

7 academic role is to represent the world with whatever certainty and authority can be mustered. Secondly, this critique of academic representation is not, as might seem the case, simply ranged against all those devotees of positivism, objectivism and foundationalism who’ve already suffered three decades of withering criticism by post- modernists/structuralists/colonialists and all the rest. Rather – and here’s where his critical reading of representation takes on an added bite – it is also intended to apply to the many doyens of 1990s novelty: that is, those critical human geographers who deconstruct representation but, in the process, inadvertently gather unto themselves the privileges of representing what they otherwise dissent from. As Spivak (1988) asked in a discussion of Deleuze and Foucault: who is to represent the representers?; can analysts of representation avoid the representational moment?

Thrift’s implicit answer to the latter question is that ‘yes, they can’, but his explicit answer is ‘no, they don’t’. Even the most reflexive critic of representation, Thrift seems to say, ultimately succumbs to one or all of the three tricks of representation. Too certain, too codifying, and too cognitive, critical theorists of representation – despite themselves – trade on that which they disavow. The difference between them and those

‘naïve’ positivists, objectivists and foundationalists is that they depict their resort to representation in order to depict representation (!) as a ‘strategically necessary evil’.

Quite how Thrift exits the representational moment himself is a moot point, of course.

This difficulty perhaps explains Hinchliffe’s (2003) more guarded critique of representation (cf Haraway’s [1992: 311-14] peculiarly absolutist dismissal). He wishes to both supplement and reinterpret representation as an explanatory and political resource. Arguing in relation to those things we conventionally call ‘natural’ and ‘non- human’, he acknowledges the importance of a critical semiotics that both contests taken- for-granted representations and offers new, more enfranchising ones. But he also worries about the lexical cast of most representational analysis in contemporary human

8 geography and commends a focus on ‘inhabitation’. Following Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz,

Tim Ingold, Sarah Whatmore and Bruno Latour, inhabitation is a quotidian, dialogical process in which multiple actors and actants encounter one another. This extends “the register of semiotics beyond its traditional concern with signification … to all kinds of unspeakable ‘message bearers’ and material processes, such as technical devices, instruments and graphics, and bodily capacities, habits and skills” (Whatmore 1999: 29).

A focus on inhabitation, for Hinchliffe, moves academics away from the role of representers to that of modest artificers who add-to the world. This is not, as he explains

(op. cit. 216), simply a matter of “becoming attuned to a pre-existing world but … is a matter of engaging with a world that becomes more highly differentiated as understanding proceeds”.

Let us move on to consider why any of this matters. Thrift’s non-representational theory is “a machine for multiplying questions and thereby inventing new relations between thought and life” (op. cit. ?). It views the world as an endless set of contingent, practical, incomplete encounters between multiple corporeal and inorganic entities. The shape and effects of these entities do not pre-exist the relations that partly constitute them. They are the shifting ‘joints’ of multiple space-times; they are not, that is to say, stable ‘building blocks’ of the world. Abstract though all this may sound, Thrift is quick to stress the political implications of non-representational theory: as he (op. cit. ?) puts it,

“It is not a political programme but it is a politics, a politics of the creation of the open dimension of being”. Political programmes seek to name villains and heroes, oppressors and the oppressed. They demand a degree of certainty-of-knowing in order to plan action-to-liberate/repress/maintain-the-status-quo. That is, they are founded on representation. As post-structural and post-colonial critics have shown so incisively, all representation – be it in the media, the archive, the scientific laboratory, the citizens’ jury, the academic essay or wherever – is political. It’s about a simultaneous speaking of

9 (enframing/staging) and speaking for (serving as a proxy). This duality of depiction and suffrage constitutes the ‘risk’ of representation – the risk of cuts and excisions, of presences and absences. As Hinchliffe (2002) usefully reminds us, this does not simply make representation politically dangerous. “There is”, he argues (ibid. 208) “a politics of recovery with which to be engaged”. The various human and non-human others that have been given ‘voice’ in recent years by critical geographers keen to deconstruct dominant representations is testament to the political ‘power’ of re-presentational acts for those on the disciplinary left. But as these geographers know, and as Hinchliffe stresses, even well-meaning representations are never ‘pure’ or ‘right’. They always freeze, order and circumscribe – in part because they assume that there is a relatively enduring order of reality waiting to be discovered, revealed or disclosed. What’s more, they cannot easily accommodate another kind of politics, a politics of ‘inhabitation’. This is a more experimental politics in which human actors (including academics) become alive to the uncertain, contingent and protean dis/connections between all manner of entities whose form and effects do not pre-exist those dis/connections. It is not a politics of suffrage or revelation by a representer but rather an open politics of encounters and modest interventions for specific purposes. For Hinchliffe, in urging an embrace of this kind of politics it is clear that there are, quite simply, “limits to representation” (ibid. 222). He tries to demonstrate as much in an essay on prions in which he shows them to be “blank figures” (Hetherington and Lee, 2000) that actively resist a stable discursive staging by the scientists investigating them.

Thrift is especially forthright about the limits of representational politics. His ontology of practical engagement, one preoccupied with the mundane business of living, calls forth a politics with four characteristics (Thrift, 2002: ?-?). First, for academics it is about modesty and intervention. It is about letting-go of authority and certainty – however ironically or self-consciously invoked – in the name of intervening in the world

10 as just one of many sets of actors. Second, a non-representational politics expands the domain of the political by being open to all sorts of technological, non-human, non- linguistic worldly agents who are normally considered ‘non-political’. Third, Thrift’s politics refuses to name general principles and distinct constituencies and looks instead for the contextual specifics of the ‘event’. Finally, a non-representational politics seeks to valorise those human capacities – such as intuition – that are normally considered irrelevant in a politics of representation. Thrift’s politics, then, “is not a prescriptive programme” (ibid.). Rather, it a looser plea for “generosity towards the world”, for

“producing new situations in which new ‘orders’ can speak and, even if in the most limited of ways, produce points of emergence” (ibid. ?). Ending on a gently programmatic note, ‘Summoning life’ commends three linked modalities of non- representational politics (ibid. ?-?): first, there’s a ‘politics of readiness’ that takes advantage of people’s increasingly extended and unexpected capacities; second, there’s a

‘politics of witnessing’ responsive to new kinds of interventions and entities (like those conjured by haptic computing); finally, there’s a ‘politics of intercession’ where people and non-humans do not represent themselves or others, but merely enter the fray of living and thereby generate surprising, unexpected and perhaps joyful effects.

It’s beside the point whether Thrift and Hinchliffe have read representation

‘right’. Neither author, in any case, resorts to caricature in their critique of representation and their recommendation of an alternative. Like Whatmore (1999; 2002), another geographer writing along the same lines, they’re simply asking how far representation can take us and what lies ‘beyond’ or elsewhere. This is all to the good and we have no wish to take-issue with the lineaments of a still-nascent post-/after-/non-representational geography. Our concern, though, is that both the ineluctability and also the resources of representation are at risk of being under-estimated in these kinds of interventions. Before we embrace the paradigmatic newness – the nextness-in-waiting – advocated by Thrift,

11 Hinchliffe and a few others, we might usefully pause to consider once again what representation – the dominant ‘new’ thematic of 1990s critical human geography – is all about. In the rest of this short essay we therefore present our own, all-too-certain reading of representation: its ineluctability, its dangers and its absolute political necessity. To be sure, representation isn’t everything, and it is only one dimension of politics (broadly conceived). But it certainly shouldn’t be subject to the ‘been there, done that’ attitude that often accompanies academic innovation.

The resources of representation

Like Hinchliffe and Thrift, our concern here is with what one might call meta- representational issues rather than any specific instances of representation. However, we will offer one specific vignette in the next section in order to flesh-out the rather abstract arguments made in this one. Our starting point is that while there’s always a politics of representation – and a sometimes nefarious politics at that, shot-through with prejudices of gender, ‘race’, sexuality, religion, speciesism and more – we should not give-up on politics by representation. Representation is never simply the province of authority, power and control. More fundamentally, we maintain that representation will not go away so long as so many actors and institutions continue to act as though (implicitly or explicitly) they and others are routinely engaged in representational acts. Let us explain this starting point before offering several specific theses on representation.

It seems to us that the arguments for a post-/non-/after-representational geography risk being misinterpreted as implying that representation – as both a subject of analysis and something that academics routinely do – is no longer to be taken seriously. This is because those arguments vacillate between being ontological ones (about an existing state of affairs) and normative ones (about what should be the case). As our brief discussion of Thrift and Hinchliffe’s writings shows, the ontological claims about

12 representation are analogous to Latour’s (1993) about the society-nature dualism. Thrift and Hinchliffe seem to say that ‘we have never been representers’ – the we being both academics and people out there in the wider world – it’s just that we thought we were for a very long time. This ontological thesis implies a ‘double reality’ scenario: to wit, on the one side we have really been representing for a very long time but, on the other, this has blinded us to the fact that we have also really been non-representational ‘inhabitors’ all the while. Ontological claims aside, the normative version of the non-representational argument is that while we have been representing in the past we should now stop doing so and embrace the alternative practices commended by Thrift and Hinchliffe. Whether one is persuaded by the ontological or normative versions of the non-representational argument, it seems clear that representation is nonetheless still with us. Hinchliffe, as we have shown, is very clear on this. It is still with us because, rightly or wrongly, many actors and institutions still act as though that their oral, written and visual productions are representational ones. That is, even if Thrift and Hinchliffe are right that we do not (or should not) act as representers/representatives, the conviction that we do still animates a great deal of academic and non-academic practice.

With this starting point in mind, we offer three theses about representation with which the non-representational theorists we’ve mentioned would doubtless concur. The first is that representations perform (with the rider that some perform more than others).

Representing is always about intervening. It’s not about attaching the ‘right’ words, sounds or images to notionally separate things. As Hinchliffe (2002: 217) observes, far from being mimetic representation is “a means of making connections”. Our second thesis is that representation always freezes that which it purports to ‘re-present’.

Representations are always specific – we hesitate to say singular – takes on things and they knowingly or illicitly depict those things as definite ‘noun-chunks’ of social or natural reality (women, animals, prions, the atmosphere or what have you). Though there

13 may be several competing or complimentary representations of the same things, and though those representations may be subject to change, they ultimately always make claims about (and often upon) things as if they have ‘captured’ some essential quality or feature of those things. Representations thus perform a certain violence by arresting the relational flux of the world. Third, this means that on whatever grounds representers seek to justify the legitimacy of their representations (e.g. the rigour of their research or their socially recognised expertise), the latter never in actuality relay the ‘essential’ or sum- total of qualities possessed by those things being represented. Representation is constitutively inadequate therefore; it is always exceeded by the world it seeks to

‘capture’. In seems to us that in these three ways (though there are more) representation is intensely political – yet without being coextensive with politics as such. It is at once dangerous and useful, incomplete and material, inclusive and exclusive.

So far so good. Nothing we’ve said above departs too far from the conventional wisdom about representation among many semioticians, post-structuralists and post- colonial critics. In human geography, these and other analysts of representation have exposed, often brilliantly, the baleful consequences of words, images and sounds that purport to be ‘objective’, ‘accurate’, ‘true’ and ‘correct’. Yet criticising specific representations does not, for most of these analysts, betoken the ‘ruin of representation’

(see Rose, this issue). The reason is that politics by representation remains of world- changing importance (Derrida, ). In order to flesh-out and make good on this claim, we offer four further theses about representation.

The first of these (our fourth thesis, then) is that while representation is not the only means of registering the needs, wants, aspirations or gestures of humans and non- humans, it is certainly a prime means. People of all stripes, in all walks of life, routinely represent (or behave like they do) – though they rarely pause to consider the complexities of the act they’re engaged in. So while Thrift is right that speech, vision and

14 cognition are not the only tools for making connections, these faculties still matter immensely. The fifth thesis is that even if we agree that our world is relationally constituted – rather than being composed of entities that pre-exist their contingent ties with others – there is therefore something politically useful about categorising things as if they have a specific nature or identity. This is especially true of those things that are most silent and least substantial, such as the ‘non-human’ and the unborn (foetuses, future generations etc.). Without spokespeople, the visibility of the things designated by these categories is crucially diminished or even lost (O’Neill, 2001).

In the sixth place, while representation always enacts a silent violence, counter- hegemonic representations of the world can have real and meaningful effects. This is why the left, within the academy and without, will doubtless remain preoccupied with representation, notwithstanding the merits of post-/after-/non-representational theory.

Counter-hegemonic representations are not, apropros of our earlier theses, about letting the oppressed/othered/invisible (delete as appropriate) ‘speak for themselves’ (Spivak,

1988). Nor are they about representers depicting the hitherto silenced or ignored ‘as they really are’. This is to wish for too much or, rather, for the wrong thing. Oppositional representations are, like the ones they’re opposed to, strategic and selective, even when they pretend not to be.

Our seventh and final thesis about representation relates to the role of academics.

Thrift and Hinchliffe want to bring them (us) down to size. While we sympathise with his desire to deflate academic certainty, it’s worth recalling Spivak’s (ibid.) acute analysis of the subaltern and the left intellectual. Critical academics, she argues, simply cannot afford to give up offering ‘strong’ representations of the world that purport to have a certain privilege. Though this privilege is a conceit, she argues that it is one those on the right do not hesitate to use for their own purposes. The left, then, has little choice: use the

15 resources of representation – make the subaltern heard (human or otherwise), however imperfectly and impossibly – or else risk being a marginal force in worldly affairs.

Together, these seven theses describe the power and the risk of representation. If this discussion seems unduly abstract, we would emphasise that it can be made to speak to any number of concrete situations. The illustrative one we briefly focus on below is drawn from research one of us has been conducting on rBST (recombinant bovine somatropin), a genetically engineered growth hormone used in commercial dairy farming

(MacMillan, 2002). Even in the wake of BSE, foot-and-mouth and other food crises, scientific representations of the non-human possess an uncommon authority and legitimacy in Western societies. It is the scientific representation of rBST that is the focus of our concern below. We should apologise immediately for the brevity of our case study.

Space restrictions forbid a fuller treatment, which can be found in MacMillan (ibid.).

The matter of representation

It has become a truism to say that science is political and that the politics are inside the science, not simply extraneous to it. In the biological sciences the representational stakes are very high indeed. On the one hand, the sheer complexity of human entanglements with non-humans in advanced capitalist societies are such that new or existing diseases, viruses and epidemics can emerge when least expected. On the other side, because those myriad things we categorise as ‘non-human’ cannot speak for themselves they must be spoken for. To be sure, sociologists of science have shown convincingly that scientists do not, in fact, represent at all – if representation means objectively depicting a separate domain of nature (Demeritt, 1996). Yet, in the sense of our seven theses, scientists arguably represent – or rather claim to represent – all the time. These representational acts arise from and inform all sorts of non-linguistic or part-cognitive scientific practices, like building experimental apparatuses. It matters little that most scientists might not

16 recognise that their representations are contingent interventions rather than the message- bearers of nature’s truths. The point is that representation – in the sense we mean it – is an ineluctable part of science (which is not to say that it is all that science is about).

rBST has had a rough regulatory passage in the European Union ever since two firms, Monsanto and Eli Lilly, applied for commercial licenses in the mid-1980s. The commercial use of rBST in the EU is now permanently banned, culminating a series of temporary moratoria that began in 1990. In the USA, by contrast, farmers began to use

Monsanto’s rBST commercially in 1994, following the drug’s approval by federal regulators.

What one can call the ‘regulatory science’ of rBST comprises a diverse range of scientists and scientific investigations that together consider the safety of using the hormone in cattle whose products – milk and meat – are intended for human consumption. Once generated, scientific representations of rBST and its effects travel to and through several regulatory committees, notably those of the European Commission and of several EU member states. These committees have powerful and particular representational responsibilities. They interpret, and generate new representations about, scientific analyses of rBST. In line with our first thesis, above, these representations are clearly, indeed intentionally, performative.

Even more than 'academic' science, representation in regulatory science is also chunky and highly selective. These features are exaggerated because regulators work to a tight time-frame and represent particularly complex 'interactions' between humans, other organisms and inanimate matter around them. Furthermore, because regulatory science generally takes the form of a review, these constituencies are one step further removed from the moment during which they are represented. So, just as the rBST cannot ‘object’ to these representations (other than through scientists generating new representations of

17 it), neither can the European public, the notional collective whose well-being the committees are charged with protecting (cf. Hinchliffe, 2001).

But whilst neither constituency – the one human, the other non-human – has a direct input into committee deliberations, they are nonetheless present in different ways.

During each committee meeting about rBST, existing and new representations of the hormone are affirmed or challenged. The committees’ representational acts are thus iterative and motile, although at key moments they can take on a paradigmatic fixity (as when sufficient evidence to accept or ban rBST’s use in the EU is deemed to have been gathered) until new representations of rBST of sufficient power shift them once more.

What we want is a model of regulatory representation that describes its chronic inadequacy, but at the same time captures its routine effectiveness and the strategic opportunities we raised in theses four through seven.

Figure 1 tries to capture what’s entailed in any act by the regulatory committees to represent rBST. There’s no suggestion here that either the committees or those who may wish to contest committee representations of rBST see their actions in this way. The top half of the quadrant refers to the objects and subjects that are explicit in any act of regulatory representation. The top right hand corner denotes those things assigned material agency in the act of representation, notably the scientists and regulators, but also includes nonhumans such as rBST whenever their character is deemed uncertain. In the top left hand corner are those things whose nature or interests are voiced, but who are substantially absent from the sites and moments of representation. The European public falls in this category here, whereas rBST has only been contained there fitfully. In the bottom half of the diagram are those various things rendered silent and invisible in any act of regulatory representation. They do not, as it were, survive the ‘cuts’ necessary for any given representation to work. But this does not necessarily mean that they are mute or inconsiderable. Nor does it mean that they will always be formally outside

18 representation. Though in the bottom left hand corner are those things that, by implication, are strictly irrelevant to any regulatory representation – for instance, one need not consider soccer when deliberating about rBST – in the bottom right hand corner are what Haraway (1991) called ‘tricksters’. These are things that have not yet (and may never) be well understood, but whose non-linguistic materiality can nonetheless trouble representations emerging in the top half of the diagram.

19 Figure 1. A round of regulatory representation.

Discursive authority

Voiced

Passive Active

Absent Present Material immediacy

Irrelevant Unknown

Silenced

Though this may look as clunky as a Greimasian semiotic square, once one appreciates that representations of the same thing can be multiple (furnished by different representatives), while being generated in successive rounds, then the perils and possibilities of representation become acutely apparent. One illustrative example concerns potentially harmful residues of the hormone IGF-1 in milk from cows treated with rBST. For obvious reasons, scientists could not experiment on members of the

European public to assess the health effects of these residues, and therefore in the late

1980s used rats as a research proxy. A routine assumption of toxicological equivalence was put to work to justify drawing parallels between rats and humans, such that the former (appearing in the top right corner of our diagram with rBST) in some sense ‘stood for’ people (appearing in the top left). Several scientific experiments apparently confirmed the safety of rBST by showing that rats fed IGF-1 were not significantly affected. By 1993 virtually all the relevant European regulatory committees had assured politicians and the public that rBST treated cattle produced safe milk.

20 At this point a trickster muddied the representational waters. Casein, a milk protein, was found to protect IGF-1 residues from degradation in the gut. It did not burst in on the confident safety verdicts catastrophically or unaided, however. Rather, Ben

Mepham, a lactational physiologist and bioethicist, became a principal spokesperson for the possible risks it posed in milk from rBST treated cattle. In the early 1990s, he raised some serious questions about the methodology used to measure IGF-1 residues and to draw inferences from rats to humans (Mepham, 1991; 1992). Drawing other scientists into the frame (Mepham et al., 1994), he then added other objects to the representation of rBST, objects that had hitherto been deemed irrelevant or whose effects were unknown.

One of these was casein, whose role in the milk of rBST treated cattle had not been researched and thus had failed to be a regulatory concern. Then, in a third set of interventions, Mepham co-authored a set of papers in the late 1990s (Mepham and

Schofield, 1997; Schofield and Mepham, 1997) that conjectured about not just casein but other related tricksters whose roles could not yet be pinned-down but which nonetheless destabilised the earlier regulatory consensus that rBST was safe for humans. Not surprisingly, Mepham’s representations became the subject of rebuttals, not least from

Monsanto and Eli Lilly scientists (e.g. Collier et al., 1994; Wilkinson, 1994). In part this was because Mepham (1994) had chosen to ‘go public’ with his concerns and thus by- pass the murky world of committee deliberations.

What’s interesting in light of our theses is that despite the intensely political nature of Mepham’s intervention – his attempt to alter the very content and implications of prevalent representations of rBST – he couched his objections to these representations in a strictly scientific language. Calling upon ostensibly apolitical and ahistorical

Popperian falsification principles, he introduced casein into the representational contest by pretending/presuming that one representation of rBST is or can be ultimately better than another (Mepham, 1992). He could draw rBST back into the top right quadrant only

21 on the premise that the rounds of representation would progress. This was hardly the most controversial episode in the regulation of rBST, but it illustrates how even the most straightforward of representational strategies can have actual political implications that academics armed with non-representational theory might find it hard to match.

The new, the not so new, and the next

Familiarity breeds contempt; but contempt is a poor reason to embrace the new. We’ve raised some questions here about formative attempts to craft a post-/after-/non- representational geography. We’ve done so not in a spirit of opposition – of saying

‘down with the new!’ – but in a spirit of cautious concern. This is, perhaps, akin to

Prendergast’s (2000: x) earlier mentioned call for “the constant renewal of a different, more judicious … reflexive turning back on the concept [of representation]”. The ‘other continent’ sited by Thrift, Hinchliffe and others is well worth exploring. But before the journey begins it’s important to know what’s being left behind and what equipment one should take along. Representation is dead. Long live representation!

Acknowledgement We would like to thank two anonymous referees for constructive comments on an earlier version of this essay and Nigel Thrift for his sympathetic editing.

References Barnett, C. 1999: Deconstructing context: exposing Derrida. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, 3: 261-76. Collier, R., Clemmons, D. and Donovan, S. 1994: Safety of milk from cows treated with bovine somatotropin. Lancet 344: 816. Demeritt, D. 1996: Social theory and the reconstruction of science and geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21, 4: 484-503. Derrida, J. ???? Haraway, D. 1991: Simians, cyborgs and women. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. 1992: The promises of monsters. In Grossberg, L. et al., editors, Cultural studies. New York: Routledge, 295-337.

22 Hetherington K and Lee C. 2000 Social order and the blank figure Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Hinchliffe, S. 2001: Indeterminacy in-decisions – science, policy and the politics of BSE. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26, 2: 182-204. Hinchliffe, S. 2003: Inhabiting: landscapes and natures. In K. Anderson et al. (eds) The handbook of cultural geography. London: Sage, page numbers not yet available. MacMillan, T. 2002: PhD thesis, School of Geography, University of Manchester. Mepham, T. B. 1991: Bovine somatotropin and public-health: need for further independent and more extensive investigation. British Medical Journal 302: 483-484. Mepham, T. B. 1992: Public health implications of bovine somatotropin use in dairying: discussion paper. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 85: 736-739. Mepham, B. 1994: Not so safe. New Scientist Sep. 10th,143: 44. Mepham, T. B. and Schofield, P. 1997: Health aspects of BST milk. IDF Nutrition Newsletter: 36-39. Mepham, T. B., Schofield, P., Zumkeller, W. and Cotterill, A. 1994: Safety of milk from cows treated with bovine somatotropin. Lancet 344: 197-198. Olkowski, D. 1999: The ruins of representation. O’Neill, J. 2001: Representing people, representing nature, representing the world. Environment and Planning C 19, 4: 483-500. Prendergast, C. 2000: The triangle of representation. New York: Columbia University Press. Sayer, A. 1993: Postmodernist thought in geography. Antipode 25, 4: 320-44. Schofield, P. and Mepham, T. B. 1997: Negligible risk. New Scientist Nov 26th, 144: 56-56 Spivak, G. C. 1988: Can the subaltern speak? In L. Grossberg et al. eds Marxism and the interpretation of culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 271-316. Strohmater, U. and Hannah, M. 1992: Domesticating postmodernism. Antipode 24, 1: 29-55. Thrift, N. 1996: Spatial formations. London: Sage. Thrift, N. 2002: Summoning life. In P. Cloke et al. (eds) Envisioning human geography. London: Arnold, page numbers not yet available. Whatmore, S. 1999: Hybrid geographies. In D. Massey et al. (eds) Human geography today. Oxford: Polity, 22-40. Whatmore, S. 2003 Hybrid geographies. London: Sage. Wilkinson, J. 1994: Safety of milk from cows treated with bovine somatotropin. Lancet 344: 816-817.

23 August 18th 2003

Dear Nigel, We’re delighted that the now retitled ‘Finessing the old, or why the new is not always good to think’ has been accepted for the special issue of EPa ‘What’s next?’. We’re also grateful to the referees for their fair and constructive comments. We enclose a revised and slightly expanded paper (word length 7K including reference). The extra words have been necessary in order to address the reveiwers’ comments. Enclosed are 2 12 point copies of the essay, double spaced. Below we explain the alterations that have been made. As you requested we have absorbed footnotes into the text.

REF 2: · The referee asked for a fuller explanation of Steve Hinchliffe’s work. We have obliged and there’s now a better balance between our discussion of your and his writings. We’ve not teased out the differences between inhabitation and dwelling because Steve’s work draws on many sources and it seems arbitrary to look only at that one difference. · We were puzzled that the referee saw the case study as a Haraway and Latour inspired effort. Even so, we’ve now tried to make the links between the case study and our theoretical arguments earlier in the paper more transparent. · Finally, the referee requested a rather fuller summary/conclusion and we’ve now supplied this.

REF 1: · The referee asked for a more explicit discussion of representation, in part because they felt we use the term to mean several things and in part because they feel we construct a straw-argument. We’ve added major paragraphs in sections 2 and 3 to address this and feel these have strengthened the paper (which is not to say all readers will agree with our arguments!). We’d contest the view that we resort to caricature or straw arguments. The essay is, we’re confident, argued in a subtle, non-confrontational way. · We’ve softened what the referee rightly identified as a knowing, slightly cynical tone of voice throughout. · We note that the reviewer suggested we ‘misread’ post-structuralism and post- representationalism. That may be so, but is there a ‘correct’ reading (?) and, supposing there’s not, we’re confident that our reading is neither simplistic, idiosyncratic nor dogmatically judgemental. By the way, we find it odd that the referee thinks us recuperating a reality-representation distinction. This absolutely does not follow from our argument, though we do argue that to the extent that many actors still operate as if this distinction held then we must engage with it and perhaps put it to strategic use.

At the end of the day, we see our argument as in many ways complimentary to yours, Steve’s and that of other like-minded people in and beyond the discipline. Thanks for your sympathetic editing given that this paper is partly about your own work.

24 With best wishes,

Noel Castree Tom Macmillan